Deepening shallow form:
Renegotiating landscape and infrastructure in the sahel
INTRODUCTION
This design led investigation attempted to answer the question of how landscape architects might work to address the increasingly urgent challenges of climate change in the Sahel region of SubSaharan Africa, an area experiencing some of the most drastic urban growth anywhere on the planet. Situated around the discourse of landscape based approaches to urbanism, it has sought to challenge the narrative of the insensitive foreign expert implementing expensive and inappropriate solutions, and argues for the potential of working with infrastructural intervention as a means to induce systemic change through strategic projects. More specifically, the central questions presented here ask how landscape architects can work to apply their professional skills towards addressing the impacts of climate change being felt with disproportionate strength across the Global South. Using the hydro-agricultural infrastructure of Mali as an example, this discussion identifies one way in which landscape based methods can be used to expand the capacity monofunctional, rigid, and fracture-critical infrastructure systems with relatively modest intervention. It does not ask why landscape architects should interject with their expertise into the South, but how one might do so in order to address, avert, or mitigate the significant risks that arise out of inaction.
FRAMING THE INVESTIGATION
The research for this project began by identifying the Sahel as a region for further study due the intensity of the environmental and demographic challenges which arise there. Fittingly derived from the Arabic word for “shore”, the Sahel refers to the semi-arid zone of transition between the Sahara Desert to the North, and the Savannah plains to the south. Receiving ~200-600 mm of precipitation yearly during a very short wet season, the Sahel is an expanse of territory defined by climate rather than lines of political jurisdiction. As such, this region has had stable yet fluid borders due to the large swings in precipitation over long time periods, and within the annual cycle of wet and dry seasons. While understanding and working with political jurisdiction is critical to actually delivering designs into built form, it is the patterns of seasonal rains and river flow determined by basic physical and chemical processes which drive the rhythm of life in human settlements and their larger ecological surrounds in the Sahel. These are reflected not only in the adaptation of organisms, but in the evolution of ethnic groups distinguished by relationships with specific elements of this dynamic region, from sedentary farmers growing dryland crops or cultivating rice (Bambara and Rimaibe), nomadic herders moving with seasonal rains (Fulani), and communities with livelihoods based on fishing(Bozo and Bamboro). While historically distinct, these various communities have relied upon close interaction and trade to form a cultural complex capable of reacting and adjusting to extreme shifts in climate, where the ebb and flow in the prominence of various kingdoms and trading empires have occurred in tandem with periods of abundance in rainfall or drought.1 With agricultural modernization and redistribution of power to distant urban regions, the habitual practices of these different groups have begun to drastically change, seeing people transition from specific areas of expertise into a mix of general practices including aspects of fishing, farming, and crop growing in order to meet their needs.
These abiotic, biotic, and cultural processes work at the regional level to organize investigation and research by allowing for the identification of critical patterns which can be more difficult to discern from the scale of the site. In this case, the large scale framing of long term and inter-annual levels of precipitation that define the Sahel are understood best in the context of the equatorial low pressure system of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) that is responsible for the wet seasons. Working within a large-scale framework acts to challenge the bias that can arise from strictly local observations. For example, recent research links the severe drought experienced across the of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with the subtle changes in global sea surface temperatures, rather than over-grazing and intensification in land use which were long assumed to be the primary factors.2 Further research also indicates a new state of more erratic precipitation patterns, correlated to ocean warming pushing the ITCZ southwards, which are of critical importance in crafting projects which anticipate and properly address the effects of climate change into the future.3 Revealing the relationship between these processes to physical form provides a means for unifying work across scales of time and place, in this case using hydrological structures to move from these strategic issues that occur across the four major watersheds of the Sahel inwards through individual river sheds and into localized catchment areas that can engage with the details of context specific to a specific place. As part the larger dialogue on landscape urbanism vis-a-vis infrastructural systems, Pierre Belanger has argued for this approach of ‘sliding across scales’ to engage fully between the territory and the site.4 This research worked to use this methodology specifically to identify points of tension between underlying operational logics of physics, ecology and related cultural traditions, with the super-imposed order of modern infrastructure systems extended across territorial scales which explicitly service urban regions.
The agricultural complex of the Office du Niger (ON) located just upstream of the Inner Niger Delta in Mali represents such a point of tension, as it diverts a steady flow of water from the Niger River which amounts to less than 10% of the yearly flow, but from 60-80% of the river’s water during the dry season. Established under French colonial administration prior to 1950, the ON is the articulation of urban influence extended into the periphery, where large swathes of land were to be brought into production explicitly for the purpose of serving an export based economy within Mali to supply French textile and manufacturing industries. Cotton, rubber, sugarcane, and rice crops were the primary targets for this new area of production, with forced labour and re-settlement of people from across the region as the initial means of building the system of agricultural production at lowest cost to the administration. Through his surveys during 1919- 21, French engineer Émile Belimé identified fossilized branches of the Niger River leading into derelict alluvial floodplains rich in fertile sediment. His plan called for these areas to be brought back to life with a barrage that would create a reservoir along the river, raising water levels enough to restore flow and irrigate up to 1 million hectares. The artificial regulation of water flow of the Niger River which began in 1946 with the completion of the Markala Barrage, and the top down form of administrating agricultural lands, has continued following the independence of Mali in 1961. Development of the area has been slow, and by the turn of the century some 100,000 Ha were under irrigation, yet numerous large-scale expansions are currently underway that will see cultivated lands triple to over 300,000 Ha by 2040. Since independence, cotton and rubber have been abandoned in favour of Asian rice varieties and sugarcane as the primary planting strategy, both of which are highly susceptible to drought and require great amounts of water to thrive.
THE FORM OF INFRASTRUCTURE
The performance of this infrastructure is at odds with the prevailing logics of the Inner Niger Delta, a crucial wetland habitat the size of Belgium which is flooded by the Niger River swollen from seasonal rains in its Southern headwaters. This incredibly rich and diverse ecosystem provides critical overwintering habitat for millions of European birds and waterfowl, and acts as a bulwark against the encroaching sands of the Sahara directly adjacent to its North. It is a critical resource for its 1.5 million human inhabitants, and in supplying the rest of land-locked Mali with 50- 100,000t of fish annually and over 50% of its domestic rice supply. The fluctuation of river flow responsible for the inundation of the Delta varies significantly, flooding anywhere from 8000km2 as seen during the drought of 1984, to well over 36,000km2 in 1957. As the wettest of the past 45 years, 2016 has seen 25,000km2 flooded, yet this would be considered only an average year in the 50+ years of records prior to 1968. The floodwaters rise as much as 6m, sustaining rich biological activity well into the dry season, and function as an engine of socio-economic development for the region. Fishing, river trading, movement of livestock, crop varieties and growing techniques endemic to this area are all tailored to this annual ebb and flow to form a highly managed ecosystem. The traditions of architectural form in the settlements occupying the highgrounds of this area, along with the patterns of agricultural activity shaping the land present examples of what John T. Lyle calls “Deep Form”, where the physical shapes and structures are reflective of underlying ecological process.5 Building on this notion, Kongjian-Yu argues that traditional farming tactics in particular, developed through trial and error over long periods of time, ‘illuminate the underlying basis for deep forms as expressions of compromise between nature and human desires, balancing natural processes and cultural intervention’.6 In contrast, the modus operandi of the current food production system has little to no active relationship with the basic operational logic of the area and its dynamic hydrological rhythms. It is a zone for agriculture only, excluding animal herders accustomed over millennia to moving their herds through the land, and in separation from the “nature” enclosed within nearby forest reserves. The amount of water delivered to the ON upstream of the Delta remains consistent from year to year, regardless of the huge variation in precipitation, and in accordance to the flow rates delimited by the geometry of the gravity fed canal system. It represents shallow form par excellence, a type of intervention built around machine dimension and universalized standards ‘which hovers on the surface of the land without connecting to natures ongoing processes’.7 American architect Thomas Fisher expands on this critique, describing such approaches to infrastructure as being “fracture-critical”, in that they require physical, political, and economic stability to a degree which leaves them prone to catastrophic failure when conditions change.8 Support for his argument of this fragility is proven quite dramatically within the ON, as two major irrigation expansions have fallen apart in the past decade alone. The first being the Malibya project funded by the former regime of Moamar Qaddafi, which built a 40km long, 120m wide canal to irrigate 100,000Ha of land to supply Libyan markets only to have it sit idle as the political turmoil in Libya deprived the project of funding and leadership. The second being the 90,000Ha American funded Alatona expansion, where funding and work was halted due to the coup over the elected leader of Mali. Smaller but more numerous fractures have appeared over time through poor maintenance, watertaxation system leading to illegal diversions, and numerous small scale conflicts between herders and local pastoralists without deep roots in the area who attempt to exclude animal passage over their lands.